EVALUATING THE DIALOGUE

This resource guide has a Dialogue Evaluation Form included in the online forms section that can be easily modified to fit your plans for your dialogue. It is important to get feedback on the different issues that you discussed so that you can effectively summarize the effectiveness of your plans and prepare for future dialogues. Feel free to create your own evaluation form.

Immediately following the dialogue or as soon as possible, planners should sit together and review the highlights and the problems encountered in order to celebrate their success and capture first impressions of the “lessons learned”.

Typically, however, it takes a while to understand the lessons that emerge from a dialogue. It will be helpful for you and others on the planning team to thoroughly debrief the dialogue by:

• Reviewing notes,
• Listening to audiotapes,
• Talking with participants privately,
• Following up in small group discussions,
• Summarizing the session in writing, and/or
• Reporting the session on the On-Line Dialogue Report Form